Il linguista incontra il traduttore. Lavori preliminari alla traduzione

Translation is a kind of linguistic action whose performance requires a layered set of choices on the part of the translator, which in turn presuppose a careful analysis of the author’s choices and full awareness of their manifold functional motivations. The term works preliminary to translation refers precisely to this step of the translator’s work. It is at this stage that linguistics, and in particular grammatical analysis, is called upon to provide the necessary theoretical and empirical tools, and in particular to draw attention to the layered set of language-specific options offered by both the source and target languages in order to face comparable functional tasks. My contribution analyses a paradigmatic case, that is, the system of available options for the expression of interclausal relations, and in particular of purpose, at the crossroads of sentence grammar and text, coding and inferencing.